Princeton Professor Emeritus Stanley Corngold will be at Labyrinth Books on Wednesday, February 27, at 6 p.m. to discuss and read from his biography, Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic (Princeton Univ. Press). This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Humanities Council.

A Princeton professor for 30 years, best known for his book Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980) was a charismatic philosopher, critic, translator, and poet who fled Nazi Germany at the age of 18, emigrating alone to the United States. Corngold’s “luminous biography” (Kirkus Reviews) is the first in-depth study of Kaufmann’s thought, covering all his major works. According to Alexander Nehamas, author of Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Kaufmann “was erudite, passionate, opinionated, and deeply controversial. In this sweeping intellectual biography, Stanley Corngold paints a lively and engaging portrait of a thinker whose views on philosophy, art, literature, politics, religion, and modernity remain of immediate importance today―a portrait that is as touching as it is compelling.”

Stanley Corngold is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University. His many books include The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory; Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature; Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka; and Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine.